The Angel Tapes Read online

  She hesitated. No, it was too risky. Elaine turned off the lamp again and went back to Blade’s minuscule bathroom, bringing telephone and notebook with her. She sat down on the side of the bath, laid the instrument on the toilet-seat cover and hit the playback button again. As the sound began to emerge from the phone speaker, she kept pace with the words in fluent, Pitman shorthand.

  In the kitchen of a restaurant in the center of town, a chubby little man named Gregory picked up a half-empty Stolichnaya vodka bottle, and poured the water it contained down the sink.

  Fifteen

  Elaine de Rossa took a cab to work on the sixth day of Angel. Her head was reasonably clear, yet she never trusted herself to drive well enough after a late night.

  Her secretary looked up from her terminal when Elaine entered the big, open-plan office.

  “Coffee?”

  “A gallon please, Margaret. And two fried Alka-Seltzers.”

  There were three E-mails for her: one from her father’s trainer, informing her of the forthcoming sale of two thoroughbreds that “the old man” would probably be interested in. He himself could not be reached; he didn’t wish to be. The other messages were junk.

  Elaine opened a fresh file and called it simply BLADE. Then she pulled her notebook from her purse and consulted the lines of hieroglyphs she’d jotted down in haste the night before. It took her no more than two minutes to translate the shorthand into words on the screen. When that was done, she read them over and over, sipping from her mug of coffee, scrolling up and down through the document, trying to make some sense of it.

  She printed the file.

  * * *

  The editor of the Sunday Courier didn’t suffer fools gladly; he was also a snob of the worst kind. You might think that a tabloid newspaper would draw its reporters from the same demographic sector as its readership. Not Brian Cusack’s. What he liked to call his “stable” was recruited from Ireland’s ruling classes and elite: the sons and daughters of bankers, lawyers, politicians, businessman, academics, and gentlemen of leisure.

  Elaine’s father combined all the qualities of the last three. Intensely rich, he owned a considerable swath of County Kildare—some of the finest horse country in Europe. Elaine had grown up in the saddle; knew her mounts, knew her racing, and knew her racing men. With such credentials, she was an asset to a paper that boasted the country’s best-informed steeplechase pages. Yet it wasn’t the horses themselves Elaine reported on, but the sleaze that attached itself with newsworthy regularity to the racing fraternity, and to their wealthy friends and business partners. It was fodder that appealed to a broad cross section of Irish society.

  Cusack frowned when Elaine swept into his inner office and dropped the sheet of paper on his desk with a flourish.

  “What’s this?” he growled.

  “You tell me, Brian.”

  Cusack scanned the lines and scratched his red goatee. A name had caught his eye.

  “Blade? Blade Macken?”

  “The same.”

  “I don’t understand, Elaine. Who’s the other character? This ‘Anon’ chap.”

  She went and shut the door.

  “I won’t stake my career on it but I’m almost certain it’s Friday’s bomber.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “No thank you.”

  Cusack was deadly serious now.

  “Get him, Elaine,” he said. “I want him.” He studied her intently. “How well do you know Macken?”

  “Well enough to have been able to get that transcript. There may be more, Brian; I don’t know. Are we on then?”

  One of Cusack’s desk phones rang.

  “Who?!” he roared into the mouthpiece. “Not now, Sammy, for Chrissake; I’ll call you back!” He replaced the receiver.

  “Bloody sure we’re on,” he told Elaine. “I want you to stick to Blade Macken like a poultice to a boil. Damn it, I knew Duffy was having us on—fuck him. A gas main: Did you ever hear the likes of it?”

  He pointed. “You stick to Macken, my girl. I don’t care what it takes, but whatever he has, I want it. And when you get it, we’ll talk about reviewing your salary.”

  “I’ll need expenses.”

  “You have a bloody expense account already.”

  “I mean,” she said coolly, “a more expensive one.”

  * * *

  While cycling past Leopardstown race track on Wednesday afternoon, Peter Macken had considered the worth of the tape recording he’d made two nights before. He’d blushed a second time when recalling the intimate things his mother had said in the heat of passion; he couldn’t imagine what his father would think of them. Again and again Peter had to convince himself that his eavesdropping was justified, that it was to the benefit of his father and him—and maybe even to Joan herself in the long run.

  Yet Roche had let little slip that offered concrete evidence that Joan Macken and he were doing more than sharing a bed. There’d been talk of Roche’s cleaning out the garage “one of these days” and he’d given Joan permission to open a letter from London, which was due to arrive the following day (he needed to know its contents before he got back from the office). There was something, too, about “the deal-to-end-all-deals,” and vague talk of early retirement. But that was all. Peter doubted if it were enough.

  He had, however, bought a small Jiffy bag for the purpose of mailing the tape to his father. He hadn’t sealed it. Peter had yet to hear what last night’s recording had yielded; perhaps it would be better. If so, he could send both tapes in the one pack.

  Joan was out when he got home. A thudding bass line and the soaring voice of Dolores O’Riordan told him that Sandra was in her room. That was good: The Cranberries at full volume would drown out any sounds from Peter’s bedroom.

  The audiocassette was full. They must have been going at it hammer and tongs, he thought grimly. He didn’t regret having spent the night at his friend Stephen’s house; his absence had spared him the real-time noises of Joan and Roche’s coupling. And wasn’t that the beauty of the setup? Peter didn’t even have to be in the house.

  He rewound the tape and hit the PLAY button.

  “No, leave the light on.”

  “Are you sure now? Supposing someone sees it.…”

  “Well, so what? Sure they’ll think it’s Joan.”

  “Mm, yeah. I hadn’t thought of that. Hey listen, you’re sure now she’ll be away till three? I’d be afraid she’d—”

  “That’s what she said, but you can take it from me it’ll be five at the earliest. The last hen party she was at, she stayed out till seven the next morning.”

  “Even so, I’d be—”

  “Listen, Finola and her were best mates at school. Finola won’t let her go before the hotel throws the whole shower of them out on their ear.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “’Course I am. Now, take my little titties in your mouth, Daddy, and suck them till they hurt!”

  Peter listened despite himself. He’d wanted to turn the damn thing off after thirty seconds. But a masochistic—or was it a voyeuristic?—side of his personality induced him to sit through the entire sordid recording.

  And hear his sister commit what constituted the ultimate sin in Peter’s eyes: that of sleeping with the enemy.

  He’d completely forgotten about the party, even though his mother had reminded them of it only days before. Of course Joan would have stayed away until the small hours. Sandra was right about that: Finola wouldn’t hear of Joan’s leaving before she and the other women had overstayed their welcome. Divorcées, Peter reflected, were ten times worse than the young brides-to-be.

  The recording ended with a barely audible click. Peter ejected the audiocassette and stared at it long and hard. There were tears in his eyes, tears of hurt and anger. Roche was, in his opinion, capable of anything. But Sandra. Good Christ. Had the fucker seduced her or had it been her idea? He desperately wanted to believe the former, yet some part of him guessed that his s
ister had made the first, tentative move. Peter was no psychologist—but you didn’t need to be to notice how Sandra looked to Roche as a father: the abstemious, hardworking, caring father she’d never had.

  He didn’t know what to do with the tape. Allowing Blade or Joan to hear it was out of the question; he couldn’t do it to Sandra, betray her like that. One betrayal was enough. And he didn’t want to think about what Blade would do to Cock Roche if he were to find out.

  But again: What to do with the incriminating evidence? Someday, he decided, he could maybe put it to good use. He’d use it to make the fucker bleed! For the moment, though, he would hide it where it wouldn’t be noticed—in the most logical place, among the rest of his cassettes, anonymous.

  Peter reached for a felt-tip pen and wrote the word BLANK on the tape’s label. Then he put it in the box along with the others.

  In his consternation, however, he’d failed to note two ostensibly unimportant things.

  One: He’d forgotten to rewind the tape.

  Two: He’d marked the label on the B side.

  Sixteen

  If it was unusually hot in Dublin in that July of 1998, then the temperature was almost unbearable in Langley, Virginia. Yet in the room that housed the three giant Unix mainframe computers, deep within the warren that was the headquarters of the CIA, the climate was maintained at a pleasant fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit the whole year round. For the benefit of the machines, not their custodians; in this room technology took precedence over human beings.

  The room’s temperature altered by a minute fraction of a degree when Jesse Murdock entered. The chief of the western hemisphere division in the Directorate of Plans was mopping his brow, and was grateful for the coolness. The air-conditioning in his own office was on the blink again.

  He nodded a greeting to the computer team and went directly to the most senior member of the Unix staff.

  “Anything?”

  “Zilch, Jesse. We’re throwing twelve hundred gigaflops from one machine at it, and almost a thousand from another, but it’s like trying to find two snowflake patterns that match.”

  “Hmm. What does that mean in American: twenty-two hundred jiggy-what’s-its-name?”

  “It means more computing power than you can ever imagine. Look at it this way. One gigaflops is a billion floating-point operations. And that’s roughly one thousand times more powerful than the computer they put on board Voyager Two in seventy-six. You know: the spacecraft that’s headed out of the solar system, searching for other life-forms?”

  “I’m impressed. But we’re looking for only one life-form here, Nick. The lowest kind.”

  He handed the technician a small, padded bag.

  “Here. Try this for size. It just came in from Larry Redfern.”

  “Another tape? Same voice?”

  “Uh huh. Might be better, though. I’ll let you people be the judge of that.”

  The technician opened the bag.

  “A DAT. It’s promising, I guess. But sound quality isn’t the issue here, Jesse. It’s calculating the algorithm that’ll convert the voice back to its original state.”

  Murdock looked at the towering bulks of the number crunchers that were going soundlessly about their work. He didn’t understand a damn thing about the infernal monsters—nor did he think he ever wanted to. Life was complicated enough.

  “How long will it take,” he asked, “to find this algorithm?”

  The technician smiled ruefully. “Who can say? Maybe two weeks—”

  “Too long. Way too long. We don’t have that kind of time, Nick. I have the White House breathing down my goddamn neck. They want results right this minute.”

  “Can I finish? It could take up to two weeks—if we’re lucky. If we’re not lucky, we’re talking maybe ten years.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “I kid you not. Look, I won’t hit you with the math involved here, Jesse, because it almost goes over my head, too.” He jerked a thumb at the computers. “That’s why we have these little fellers to help us. But I’ll give you an analogy, if it’ll help.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You’re not colorblind, by any chance?”

  “No.”

  “Just checking. Okay, let’s take the most common form of colorblindness: red-green blindness. Somebody who’s RG blind can’t distinguish between reds and greens, no matter what shades they are. And believe me, Jesse, there are a hell of a lot more than forty shades of green, in spite of what my old Irish grandmother used to say. I’ve a daughter doing art studies at Moore College. She reckons there are millions. Maybe she’s right. Try talking to somebody in a body shop about getting colors to match if your car’s scratched.”

  “I’ve been there.”

  The technician placed his fingers on his temples and pulled a face. “So here’s our colorblind friend. Those millions of shades of green and red—they’re all brown to him. You’ve seen the color tests, I guess: little dots of red, green and brown that make up a pattern? Say, the number forty-five in green and red on a field of brown dots?”

  “I think so. Yes, I know them. Had ’em in the army—and in the tests the agency runs.”

  “They’re pretty much standard. So this RG-blind guy can’t read the number; everything looks brown to him. Now, ever been to the Guggenheim in New York?”

  “A couple of times, yes.”

  “How many paintings have they got? Take a guess. Only the ones on show.”

  “Umm, two thousand? Three?”

  The technician laughed.

  “Try ten thousand; you might be closer. It’s a very big gallery. But let’s say there’s half that number. Now: We give our colorblind friend a swatch of red and a swatch of green, like the color samples the paint companies put out. Then we set him loose in the Guggenheim and his mission is to find a portion of any painting that matches those samples exactly.”

  “Mission Impossible.”

  “Right in one. It could take him years, maybe the rest of his life. That’s what we’re dealing with here, Jesse: Mission goddamn Impossible.”

  Murdock was sweating again. The Unix machines hummed to one another across the unseen, unimaginable tracts of cyberspace. Murdock had a sudden, wild fancy that their electronic songs sounded sad and frustrated.

  Later the two men walked together through the long corridors of the Langley labyrinth. Murdock was a troubled man.

  They rounded a corner—and the computer technician stopped dead in his tracks. He almost saluted, as a young woman wearing a CIA identity tag and a man whose ID dubbed him VISITOR approached from the opposite direction. The technician stood, slack of jaw, as the pair strolled past.

  “That wasn’t … was it, Jesse?”

  Murdock smiled. He needed cheering up.

  “Nope. But I’ll tell you something, Nick. I’d be mighty happy if I made half as much as that guy earns. Not that I’d trade places with him. I’m too fond of living.”

  The technician continued to stare after the retreating pair.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  Seventeen

  There were few things Jim Roche enjoyed more than new gizmos. Give him a fresh piece of electronic wizardry and he was like a kid again.

  The unit that he now held in his hand was no bigger than a television’s remote control. It also worked in a similar way, using infrared technology. The difference was that this device didn’t emit signals but was built to receive them. In the trade it was known as a countersurveillance sweeper.

  Because buggers could be bugged, too.

  He’d the house to himself that Thursday afternoon: Joan was at the tennis club, Peter was cycling in Wicklow, and Sandra would be staying overnight with a girlfriend. Roche could put his gadget through its paces at his leisure, undisturbed.

  He decided on a multiple trial, in order to test whether the device was capable of isolating a number of signals simultaneously. First he fitted a microphone into a table lamp and marrie
d the transmitter’s signal to a tape recorder in the garage. Next he placed in the hall an attaché case containing a built-in, voice-activated recorder. He rigged the third bug to the telephone; as soon as the receiver was lifted, a tape recorder would kick in.

  It worked a treat. He experienced a little difficulty with the attaché case but soon had the glitch fixed. The countersurveillance sweeper scanned the house, registered, and homed in on the three bugs.

  And found a fourth.

  Roche stared with disbelief at the red light flashing on the dial. He went to audio and, sure enough, heard a faint zooming sound. He redirected the device. The zooming grew. Roche walked toward the rear wall, but the signal didn’t increase significantly in strength.

  Then he pointed it at the ceiling.

  Many thoughts went through Roche’s head as he climbed the stairs. There was always the possibility that he’d left a piece of equipment in the bedroom he shared with Joan. But that was nonsense: He never brought anything up there, let alone switched it on accidentally. Joan? That was crazy, too. Why would she? Why should she?

  It didn’t take him long to find the rogue power outlet: His sweeper led him straight to it. He didn’t even need to disassemble it to confirm that it contained the bug; the device in his hand fairly hummed with excitement when it drew close.

  It was one of Roche’s own samples; he could see the rectangular trace of adhesive left by the removal of the Centurion Security sticker. He’d dozens of the things, yet kept account of each one of them, knew its exact location at all times. It was a matter of pride with him. He’d no idea how this one had gotten here—but by God he could find out easily enough!

  He thumbed the dial on the sweeper that changed the mode from SOURCE to RECEIVER and let the device execute a slow arc. A zooming note sounded when he aimed it in the direction of the door. Peter’s room lay beyond that door, on the other side of the corridor.

  Goose bumps formed on Jim Roche’s neck. Throughout his entire career he’d never—to his knowledge—been bugged. It was an unsettling feeling: as a soldier must feel when, having spent many months on the firing range, he’s suddenly confronted in combat with targets that shoot back.